The drilling of holes in both single sided, double sided, and multilayer printed circuit board laminates is a particularly critical machining operation. Good quality holes are essential to producing high quality circuit boards. A good quality hole is one that is produced having minimal defects. Such defects typically include resin smear, nail heading, rough hole walls, inaccuracy of the hole size and of its position on the board. While some of these problems may be alleviated by proper choice and proper curing of the laminated material and use of a proper backup material, a complete solution requires a drill of proper design and the application of proper drilling techniques. These drill design and drilling techniques are controlled by a balance of drilling feeds and speeds and the geometry and condition of the drill edges and clearance face surfaces. A drill having the wrong drill point geometry and/or with worn cutting edges generates excessive heat during the drilling operation. This is particularly critical in drilling circuit board laminates since the epoxy material used in the laminates is a poor heat conductor. The heat of drilling may cause the epoxy to melt or flow and cause resin smear within the drilled hole. If the cutting edges of the drill are chipped excessively, burring and nail heading conditions may be created since the drill is no longer cutting cleanly. Nail heading conditions occur most frequently in the instance of point chipping of the drill in which excessive chipping occurs at the outside corners of the interface where the primary cutting edge meets the margin cutting edge. It has been found that this chipping of the cutting edges is due to shear forces encountered in the cutting wedge of the drill. It tends to occur very early in the life of a drill thereby requiring frequent drill changes which are expensive in terms of both drill cost and production down time.